8.1 Writing and Disciplinary Learning
As noted in Chapter 7, writing, like reading, is essential to both the practice and the learning of academic disciplines. Most disciplinary activities involve some form of writing, and writing has been documented to clarify conceptual understanding, promote metacognition, enhance content learning, and cultivate disciplinary habits of mind (Graham & Perin, 2007). As the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges (2003, p. 9) observed,
If students are to make knowledge their own, they must struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else. In short, if students are to learn, they must write.
Not only is writing a means of extending and deepening students' content understanding, it is also a tool for construing, communicating, and demonstrating what they have learned. Students use writing to achieve a variety of goals, such as reflecting on a past experience, expressing an opinion, describing an object or a process, making an argument, explaining a phenomenon, and reporting on an experiment. For these reasons, English language teachers have been urged to use disciplinary texts to teach writing (and reading) skills, and content experts have been exhorted to provide students instruction and practice in discipline-specific writing (and reading).(https://www.daowen.com)
Despite the importance of writing to disciplinary learning and to demonstration of what has been learned, many students, especially those for whom English is not their first language, struggle with writing, with the consequence that they are not fully prepared to meet the demands of college either in China or abroad. Their problems stem not so much from a lack of ideas (content) as from a lack of control over discourse organization strategies and lexicogrammatical choices for producing effective and powerful writing. Sang (2017) reviewed 29 recent studies published in China to identify issues common to Chinese undergraduate students' English writing. He found that despite years of instruction on vocabulary and grammar, Chinese students — both English and non-English majors — demonstrate limited proficiency in applying the lexical and grammatical knowledge taught in class and insufficient knowledge in writing skills/strategies. They produce writing that regularly contains basic grammatical errors; is not lexically diverse or syntactically varied; lacks depth, flow, and critical-mindedness; and exhibits a range of rhetorical problems (e.g., making claims/arguments with little evidence, overboosting, overgeneralizing). These difficulties render their writing dry, stilted, illogical, and incoherent. Leedham (2015) analyzed a corpus of assessed academic writing by Chinese students pursuing undergraduate studies in the United Kingdom and compared it to a reference corpus by English native speaker students. She found that Chinese students tended to use a smaller range of lexical items than did their native speaker peers, overuse informal connectors (e.g., besides, first of all, what's more), underuse formal expressions preferred by native speaker students, and make greater use of informal language, first person plural pronoun (we), visuals, and lists.
It is clear that students need support in developing the linguistic resources (and other skills) needed to write proficiently in their disciplinary learning. This chapter focuses on teaching writing in the context of learning about science. Specifically, it shows how English language teachers can scaffold academic writing development in the process of engaging their students in meaningful learning that helps broaden and enrich their content knowledge base within and beyond subject English, which is a key goal of English instruction in postsecondary education (e.g., 高等学校外语专业教学指导委员会英语组，2000; 高等学校大学外语教学指导委员会，2017).